This invention relates to a garment hanger, and in particular to a hanger of the type comprising a middle section with a hanging member such as a hook mounted thereon and two end sections with means for engaging a garment, at least one of the end sections being arranged for sliding movement relative to the middle section between a retracted position and an extended position, and being biased towards the extended position.
Known hangers of this type generally employ a compression spring to urge the or each end section to the extended position. Examples of such hangers are found in UK patent applications published as Nos. 2021402A and 2120542A.
Hangers employing springs such as are known in the art suffer from a number of disadvantages. Foremost of these is their expense. Steel springs on their own are expensive in comparison with the relatively cheap plastic parts of the hanger. Moreover, they are notoriously difficult to handle when loose. For example, they tend to tangle with each other, and it is difficult to load the springs on a machine in a manner that will enable the springs to be presented to a hollow middle section of the hanger for insertion in an automated process. This adds to the expense of employing coil springs.
A further factor which adds to the expense of using coil springs lies in the manufacture of a hollow middle section. There are two principal ways in which this section can be made. The hollow inside can be formed around a core which is inserted longitudinally into the mould from one end of the middle section, or it can be made, as in UK patent application No. 2120542A, by a number of mould projections which are inserted from the sides of the hanger to form alternate openings to each side of the hanger, so that the openings join together to create a continuous channel down the middle. This latter method of manufacture is much cheaper than the former but is not very suitable for use with coil springs. This is because if a coil spring is inserted in the channel and compressed, the individual coils of the spring catch on the edges of the openings and the operation of the spring is uneven and noisy.
Apart from the cost of manufacturing hangers with coil springs, these hangers have other disadvantages. The extent to which such a hanger can be compressed is limited by the presence of the spring in the hollow middle section because, at its maximum compression, the spring still occupies a finite length of the channel. In practice, it is found that this limitation on the variation of width of the hanger means that more than one size of hanger needs to be made to accommodate the range of garment sizes normally required to be hung. If the range over which the hanger could be compressed was increased, then only one size of hanger would have to be used. This could cut down on manufacturing costs and moreover would be of benefit to the trader using the hanger, because he would not have to concern himself with the sizes of the garment and of the hanger.
While it has been proposed to use rubber bands in hangers, rather than coil springs, as in German Patent Application No. DE 3530380 Al and German Gebrauchsmuster No. 7620036, these hangers have not met with substantial commercial success.